CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 Launched, Extends CollabNet Value to Application Lifecycle Management

Business Wire, Sept 12, 2005

BRISBANE, Calif. -- Product Incorporates Application Lifecycle Management Features and Third-Party Tool Integrations to Enable Codified yet Flexible Process Support for Distributed Software Development

CollabNet, the leading provider of on-demand (SaaS) distributed software development solutions, today launched the next generation of the company's flagship software development platform, CollabNet(R) Enterprise Edition 4.0. The new version features the CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager, a codified yet flexible set of process templates containing content, artifacts, and tools that guide project members through the application lifecycle to help organizations overcome their distributed software development challenges.

The CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager helps corporations create a sustainable advantage in a new era in which applications are developed by decentralized teams collaborating over the Internet. CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager builds upon the process knowledge gained from CollabNet's six years of industry-leading experience helping 500,000 software developers worldwide build applications in a distributed manner.

The CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager in CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 enables project managers to select and customize a choice of pre-configured process templates. These selectable process templates range from the CollabNet-supplied Baseline Process Template to client-generated templates to CollabNet partner-supplied templates and address a broad range of software development styles and business processes. The CollabNet Baseline Process Template is a selectable no-cost option that can be utilized on a project-by-project basis or can be enforced company-wide to drive adherence to specific processes. The CollabNet Baseline Process Template and user-defined process templates can be easily followed by everyone working on a project, including CIOs, executives, product managers, architects, developers, QA, operational and support personnel, as well as outside partners.

"The CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager will provide Oracle Consulting with a platform to further leverage Oracle's delivery methodologies with customers as well as partners. The powerful tools available in CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0, combined with the ability to implement Oracle's own methods within the environment, provides a compelling solution for developers and business users alike," said Marc Horowitz, Practice Director at Oracle.

Process templates enable CIOs and their software development teams to customize and define consistent processes for their particular projects by allowing organizations to codify all lifecycle phases: requirements definition, design, deployment, and other process-related activities. The CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager also provides CIOs and their project managers global visibility to measure and subsequently improve their distributed software development processes. By establishing clear milestones, offering customizable and methodology-agnostic processes, and providing the software development, collaboration, and project management tools necessary to achieve those identified milestones, CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0 offers distributed development teams and their managers the most comprehensive environment for creating successful software applications.

"Increasingly, software development practices are becoming distributed. Case in point is the fact that a number of today's leading computing initiatives like SOA, compliance, outsourcing, convergence, open source, and other strategic community development programs all share the need to assemble distributed software development teams," said Bill Portelli, President and CEO of CollabNet. "In this distributed environment it has become essential for CIOs to set, measure, and improve their development processes and for project teams to understand and complete their specific development tasks in view of the overall lifecycle. Out of these necessities, CollabNet has developed a secure on-demand centralized delivery model integrated with a flexible yet enforceable software development process to enable true distributed lifecycle management."

The capabilities the CollabNet Application Lifecycle Manager offers are unique from existing LAN-based vendor offerings which provide, at best, fractured tool and application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities when used with distributed development. Based on CollabNet's work with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, as well as documented industry analyst definitions for distributed development and ALM capabilities, CollabNet has generated a five-level ALM Maturity Model. This model is a codified system which documents a project team's desired distributed development aptitude as driven by their business and design goals. It then describes the resulting capabilities, benefits, and shortcomings of their employed tool and process solutions for globally distributed ALM.

"The ALM Maturity Model documents the various phases of ALM adoption in which enterprises will find themselves and offers a path toward Maturity Level-5, process-enabled globally distributed development. Today, that path goes through CollabNet Enterprise Edition 4.0," continued Portelli. See http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/gc/webletter/collabnet/issue1/ index.html for more information. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)